Chinese language for dummies: 1. The logic of the characters

Every language is logical, follow me to discover the logic of Chinese characters!

1. The basic characters(象形文字)
The brilliant ancient Chinese people invented Chinese basic characters according to the physical appearances of the objects. Some of the earliest and most basic Chinese characters can be found below:

2. The complex characters(复杂文字)
A complex character is a combination of different basic characters. There are different logic for combining basic characters:

a. Combination of the sound, and the meaning
Let’s take an example of a few characters:
The character represents Mom, in Chinese is pronounced as “ma”. To create this character, we choose a basic character which already pronounced as “ma” which is 马(horse), and then add another part represents woman to it. As a result, the Chinese character for mom is: 妈.

Just to clarify, mom in Chinese has nothing to do with horse but the pronunciation.
The same logic goes for 湖(lake), 艇(ship) and 扶(to support)…

b. Combination of two basic element to form a new object
This kind of characters has a combination of both elements in the characters, and according to me, is super logical, unfortunately, in this case you cannot guess the pronunciation of the character.

Let’s take two characters:
灶(stove) = 火(fire) + 土 (clay)

Nowadays, the kids would not understand the logic of this character, same reason as below:

In the old days, perhaps 30 years ago, in the countryside of China, the stove is actually indeed made of clay, and you need to manually burn woods to heat up the pot in order to cook.

Another one: 囚(prison) = a person (人) inside a square(口)

3. The combination of characters (词语)
It is not enough to learn just single Chinese characters, we actually more often combine 2 – 3 Chinese characters in order to give it a new meaning, especially for modern words